Dutch is like English in that simple attributively used participles and modal infinitives are usually prenominal, but differs from English in that this also holds when they are heads of complex phrases; cf. Sleeman (2011/2014) for discussion. Postnominal placement is not completely impossible in such cases, but it usually leads to a marked or marginal result. This is illustrated in (19) for past/passive participles: while the primeless examples are fully acceptable, the primed examples are highly marked, regardless of whether the participle is adjacent to the verb or not.

The fact that prenominal placement is the rule in Dutch is clearly related to the fact that Dutch is an OV-language: since the PP-complement aan hen and the complementive in de kast usually precede the participle, the latter can be used in prenominal position without violating the head-final filter on attributive adjectives in (20); cf. Section 27.3, sub IB.

VO-languages such as English do not satisfy this filter in the case of such attributively used complex prenominal participle phrases, because PP-complements and complementives must follow the participle; this inevitably leads to the order found in the English translations in (19). Sleeman (2011) argues on the basis of the Dutch examples in (19) that the prenominal and postnominal participle phrases are structurally different: since the prenominal but not the postnominal participles carry attributive inflection, she argues that the former are attributively used participle phrases while the latter are predicates of phonetically reduced relative clauses. It should be noted, however, that the primed examples could potentially also be analyzed as (reduced) appositive clauses; this is also suggested by the fact that these examples improve considerably if they are preceded and followed by an intonation break, typically found in appositions; cf. Section N16.1.3. This seems to be even more true for the present participle phrase in Sleeman’s (2011) example in (21b).

Sleeman claims that modal infinitives such as (door hen) te lezen resist postnominal placement, although they seem to allow an appositive reading when preceded and followed by an intonation break.

Given the markedness and unclear status of the postnominal use of participles and modal infinitives, we will ignore them for the remainder of this section; however, we will present some clear cases of their appositive use in Section 31.3.3.